HP's Chromebook 11 was with me for most of the show. Here's what I ran into.

When I'm on the road, the computer I usually take with me is my 13-inch MacBook Air. It's loaded up with all my regular programs, the tools I need to process photos and video and assist with our liveblogs, and it runs both OS X and Windows so I can run and test basically anything I'd need to be able to test when I'm out and about.

For CES, I wanted to try something a little different. I still brought the MacBook Air because my experimentation can't get in the way of me doing my job, but I decided a couple of weeks ago I'd try to cover the bulk of the show on an HP Chromebook 11. It's not as harsh a challenge as Wired's Smartphone Thunderdome thing—I could use the Air if I wanted, but whenever possible I'd try to do everything I had to do within Chrome OS. This is what I took away from the experience.

Yes, specs matter

"Specs don't matter, as long as you have enough of them." Intel's Mooly Eden said this to me during a meeting about the company's RealSense 3D camera, and while it's not a new sentiment, the Chromebook I had sleeping in my bag at the time really drove his point home.

The Chromebook 11 uses a year-old dual-core ARM SoC, the Samsung Exynos 5250. For home or casual use it's not a bad chip, but relying on it for time-sensitive things highlights just how much slower it is than even the slowest of Intel's Haswell CPUs. The things I shouted at the Chromebook as I tried to file a story from Nvidia's Sunday night press conference are unprintable.

This was my first inkling that my experiment would be hampered less by Chrome OS itself and more by the particular Chromebook I had chosen. A cheap Intel Chromebook like Acer's C720 is around twice as fast as the Chromebook 11, and I was constantly wishing for more speed, whether I was loading up the resource-sucking Outlook Web App to check e-mail or just trying to load a bunch of tabs in rapid succession.

Not for photo editing

No RAWs for you, not without conversion anyway.

Andrew Cunningham

Most of the stories I filed from CES were just text with a couple images sprinkled in. I wrote most things straight into our WordPress CMS rather than screwing around with Google Drive, mostly because Drive tends to insert weird formatting tags that often need to be stripped out.

If I was grabbing the images from a press site or from a previous article, Chrome OS was just as good as any other operating system. Its file explorer is rudimentary compared to Windows Explorer or the oft-maligned OS X Finder, but it's fine if all you need to do is download and re-upload an image, or use the Dropbox website to upload something to a shared folder.

Things broke down when I needed to get pictures from my Canon EOS Rebel T3i on to the laptop and then up on the site. The Chromebook 11 doesn't have an SD card slot, and Chrome OS won't recognize the camera when it's connected via USB. I could have circumvented this by planning a little better and bringing a USB SD card dongle, but I had assumed that the USB connection would be good enough—no such luck.

I put the images on the MacBook Air and then copied them to a USB drive, just to see what image manipulation would feel like on the Chromebook. Once again, the laptop's specs disappoint—while its IPS display gives you nice colors and contrast, something as simple as adjusting exposure takes several seconds to perform. Editing 18MP jpegs on an ARM chip is exactly as fun as it sounds, and forget about RAW files (you'll have to, because Chrome OS won't open them). Doing light image work is possible in Chrome OS but compared to Windows or OS X you'll be doing it with one hand tied behind your back (you know, figuratively).

Not for video editing

Take all of the above and multiply it by a hundred. Even if Chrome OS included a passable video editor, using it with a dual-core ARM CPU would be a fool's errand. And even if you wanted to put up with that, the Chromebook's 16GB SSD would put a hard limit on how much footage you could store locally in the first place.

Charge ahead

Enlarge/ The new Chromebook 11 charger is actually more attractive and distinctive than the old one.

Andrew Cunningham

I've got the revised, non-melty version of the Chromebook 11's micro USB charger, and for the most part it was actually as convenient as it promised to be. I could stow just one power brick in my bag for the Chromebook, a Verizon MiFi, and my Mophie JuicePack battery, and when you're walking miles with a ton of gear strapped to your back you want to do anything you can to lighten the load.

The only problem is that it takes quite a while to charge the laptop—if you're actively using the device as you charge it, it can take as long to charge as it does to discharge. This isn't disruptive if you're charging the Chromebook overnight, but if you happen to be running low on juice and need a quick hit from an outlet you won't get as much runtime-per-minute-of-charging as you'll get with other laptops.

Switching woes

Most of the gripes I had about my week with the Chromebook 11 were about that hardware specifically, but there were still problems I would have had with any Chromebook. Between Web apps and the stuff in the Chrome Web Store, it was possible for me to replace most of the essential tools in my arsenal. The most mission-critical are the ones that I use to communicate. For an IRC client, I've settled on CIRC because of its clean, no-nonsense interface, though I don't mind Mibbit either. To connect to our private XMPP server, I used its not-awesome-but-good-enough Web interface. I prefer any client version of Outlook to the Web version, especially when I'm traveling between timezones (the Web app can use only one universal timezone setting, while the clients can make appointments in any timezone you want), but it worked well enough to get by on.

Here's the thing that keeps me from recommending Chromebooks to light users without reservation, though. Even if you can do everything you need to be able to do on a Chromebook, switching from any operating system to any other operating system is going to cause some friction. I use OS X to get most of my work done because it's got a bunch of built-in features and applications that I like. I use Full Screen Mode to keep my laptop's display organized and uncluttered. I like Limechat because it's got a bunch of preferences and settings that lets me change the way it looks and works. I like Messages because it lets me connect to our XMPP server and Google Talk and iMessage, all within one client.

That's what bothers me the most about Chrome OS. It's not that you can't do a lot with a Chromebook. It's not even about getting used to different tools. It's just that the operating system works so differently from established desktop operating systems that you'll have to alter many of your normal workflows. No one's saying it's impossible to do, but for people used to something else it can be a laborious process.

It's not all bad

All of these complaints aside, I was able to cover the majority of CES with the Chromebook 11. I had one full cheat day on Monday, because I need Windows or OS X to run our image uploading tools for liveblogs and I didn't want to carry two laptops around all day. Even the biggest sticking point—importing and manipulating images—could have been circumvented in part with a card reader dongle (or better yet, a Haswell Chromebook with an SD card slot integrated). Even during the few times when I was without a reliable Internet connection throughout the show, Google's apps and the Outlook Web App's offline modes are robust enough that I could still get things done. I didn't have problems with battery life (usually between five and six hours on a single charge), or with opening documents or files aside from the image and video problems mentioned above. It was better than working with a tablet or smartphone because it's got a real keyboard and because WordPress hates mobile browsers.

Did I prefer using a Chromebook to using my regular tools? No, not really. Is it possible to do and come back home with your sanity intact? Sure! That's probably something we couldn't have said 12 or 18 months ago, and it's why Chrome OS is so interesting—it doesn't do everything a PC can do, but Chromebooks do enough of what a PC does that they can pose a credible threat to low-end laptops. And in case you hadn't noticed, that's where a lot of the volume of the PC market comes from these days.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

150 Reader Comments

It always amazes me just how long the SD card is sticking around. And yes, I've done the budget laptop thing, and eventually those all became very thin clients or donations to people I didn't like. At some point, you have to realize that good technology costs money, or be really patient on finding deals.

Part of the problem surely is that for those odd occasions when you are doing something a Chromebook can't, that's when you wish you had a "real" computer, and most people who are buying a Chromebook instead of a "real" computer aren't going to be carrying around two devices like you were.

As an "extra" computer, it's feasible, or for limited use people (such as, not to overgeneralise, older people who aren't doing much more than emailing to stay in touch with people etc). But on a longer term basis, if you're wanting to do "stuff", can you realistically get away with it being your one computer?

As an "extra" computer, it's feasible, or for limited use people (such as, not to overgeneralise, older people who aren't doing much more than emailing to stay in touch with people etc). But on a longer term basis, if you're wanting to do "stuff", can you realistically get away with it being your one computer?

I would say that I do lots of "stuff" on my Chromebook - I'm a PhD student in computer science, and I'm on the laptop all day, essentially. It does everything that I need it to, which consists almost entirely of a browser and an ssh client (so I can log in to our lab's workstation to write and run code). For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 on ebay (the LTE version - they're pretty cheap on ebay right now, because of all of the people that got them for free at Google I/O and want to sell them).

...For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 ...

These seem like good arguments to like the Pixel hardware but find Chrome limited.

This is a nice, balanced article without the usual tech press hyperbole ("Why ChromeOS will destroy Microsoft!" "Why ChromeOS is completely useless!"). Thanks for avoiding the ideological stuff and giving some useful details about how the Chromebook fits your workflow.

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

I've done blogging-from-a-holiday, including RAW-format pictures from a DSLR, just using iPhoto on an iPad and a lightning-to-SD adaptor. It's not perfect - at least at the time iPhoto would not import pictures that the camera had marked as being taken in portrait mode, so I had to turn off the marking and spend twenty minutes at the end of the holiday rotating pictures. But it basically worked.

I'd have been inclined just to turn off RAW-mode on the DSLR, but you're probably dealing with such low-light conditions at CES that you have to under-expose and recover in post-processing - I was using RAW because I was at an exhibition of spot-lit primary-coloured shiny glass things against black backgrounds and the camera was tending to saturate the red channel unless I turned exposure down several stops.

I think these articles, however, suffer from being written by people who are fairly technical and also highly mobile (and that includes me). While I couldn't work with a Chromebook professionally, I'm still interested in one for home use.

But for a lot of the population:

1. The majority of laptops, tablets and Chromebooks hardly ever leave the house, if at all. Probably as many as two-thirds.2. Taking my mother as an example, she uses her laptop PC for web-browsing, email and video chats, she writes letters on Microsoft Works and she uploads pictures from her camera. All these things can be done on a Chromebook. And I suspect there are an awful lot of people like her.

Therefore, the idea of an idiot-proof OS that does all the basics is quite appealing. Just not to a lot of Ars readers and writers.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

It always amazes me just how long the SD card is sticking around. And yes, I've done the budget laptop thing, and eventually those all became very thin clients or donations to people I didn't like. At some point, you have to realize that good technology costs money, or be really patient on finding deals.

Yeah, you get what you paid for. Seriously.

I've been looking for an unsuspecting victim to gift my Netbook to but no luck. People can sense these things from few yards away and run away. So no, I'm not buying into another cheap laptop scheme. Got an Air, loaded OSX and Windows and I have the best of both worlds.

The ChromeBook IS worse than a NetBook. It is a cheaper and more limited version of a NetBook.

You might as well get a real NetBook like a lightweight Windows 8 Laptop with a touch interface.

Or simply get a MacBook Air.

Either option would be so much better and just as light as a ChromeBook.

"Simply" spend 3-5x the price. There are clear limitations to Chrome OS by itself that will hopefully be rectified by more native programs from Google, but the performance issues can almost entirely be eliminated by moving to a Haswell equipped device.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

It's just a brochure for Las Vegas, a town that tries way too hard to make you feel like you're living ON THE EDGE even though all you're REALLY doing is drinking crappy beer and playing $5 blackjack in a hotel casino.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

We write tons and tons of non-Apple articles and plenty that are critical of the company, so on that count you'll just get downvotes because you're wrong.

Obviously we can't control what people say in the comments, but I'd guess that people want to see Apple offerings in these categories because Apple has historically been pretty good at entering existing markets and rethinking the way products work in sensible and beneficial ways.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

This reads more that you aren't happy with how competent Apple devices are. I've never owned a Mac, iPhone or iPad, but I recognize that they're extremely useful for most purposes.

...For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 ...

These seem like good arguments to like the Pixel hardware but find Chrome limited.

Note that I said "Chromebook", not "ChromeOS". The title of the article also said "Chromebook". But in any event, ChromeOS does the "browser + ssh client" very well; way better, in fact, than Windows, OSX, or Linux, precisely because it doesn't have all of the extra cruft that I don't need (that's the point of the stratechery article I cited above). It's simple, fast, and secure. It means I only have to maintain one machine (my workstation), instead of two (my workstation and my old laptop). I don't, actually, find ChromeOS to be severely limiting, because it does everything that I need it to. And I don't fall into the "technologically illiterate" camp that many people say is the only real market for Chromebooks.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

I guess the main issue with my original post is I said Chromebook, when really I meant ChromeOS.Installing another OS in order to do stuff means that really you're just buying a cheap laptop, which the article implies is something the Chromebook would replace doing.

If you are instead just buying a Chromebook to put another OS on it, you are just buying a (cheap) laptop (ignoring the fact you got an expensive Chromebook, as this article seemed to conclude more on replacing "PCs" at the low end).

If you say "ChromeOS can do nearly everything but I can install another OS for non-Chromebook tasks", then why did you buy a Chromebook? Why not just buy a laptop (sans OS, which sometimes you can actually do) and then just use the other OS all the time.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

I guess the main issue with my original post is I said Chromebook, when really I meant ChromeOS.Installing another OS in order to do stuff means that really you're just buying a cheap laptop, which the article implies is something the Chromebook would replace doing.

If you are instead just buying a Chromebook to put another OS on it, you are just buying a (cheap) laptop (ignoring the fact you got an expensive Chromebook, as this article seemed to conclude more on replacing "PCs" at the low end).

If you say "ChromeOS can do nearly everything but I can install another OS for non-Chromebook tasks", then why did you buy a Chromebook? Why not just buy a laptop (sans OS, which sometimes you can actually do) and then just use the other OS all the time.

Yeah this test was more for a Chromebook as-is, but you can do more with them if you like to hack around. The 16GB of storage most of them have is a real limiter though.

It means I only have to maintain one machine (my workstation), instead of two (my workstation and my old laptop).

Adding Ubuntu for a full linux desktop and SD card bootable Android seem a bit like maintaining to me.

The SD card booting into android was purely for fun, not so I could use the machine for work. I admit that crouton adds some amount of maintenance overhead, but it's also not really necessary for work. As I said, it's only very rarely that I ever have a desire to use crouton. Almost always I just use the browser and the ssh client, and ChromeOS is the best operating system I've ever used if that's all you want to do. And it maintains itself, there is quite literally nothing to do to maintain it. You just log in. Adding crouton doesn't mean that I have to maintain the ChromeOS side, which is what I use the vast majority of the time.

This was an interesting investigation into how little computing can you get by on. The usual hierarchy is text, audio, image, video, and it sounds like you were pushing the envelope with the HP 11 when you got into image processing, but that it's probably fine for text and mixed text and video viewing. I'm willing to bet it's aces as an MP3 player or quick voice recorder.

It sounds like a usable solution for a lot of people, but close to the bottom end. You could probably move up to a more powerful HP Chromebook with an Intel processor for not a whole lot more. Of course, you're walking around with a Canon Rebel that takes 18MP images. You would probably have done better with a computer that cost as much as your camera. (If you had a $500 audio capture device, you would have probably be in the same boat and noticed the machine's limitations. Ditto for video.)

Out of curiosity, how well did the HP 11 play video, e.g. a ripped DVD or streamed file? I'm guessing it would be passable, but that no one would want to do serious video editing on such a device.

Most of those commenting here use computers in their work, and that means they usually want power to spare. If you write code, you probably sit idle in a text editor or reading documentation most of the time, but there is nothing like the tedium of a big build. If you deal with large raw images, multi-channel audio or HD video, you will usually be fine with your machine coasting, but every so often you will find yourself in the passing lane and really appreciating what an extra few hundred dollars can buy you.